For the moment, he would set aside the fact that in order to do what he needed to do he would need access to one for at least a few moments when no one was watching him, but one step at a time. There were many ways to fail between that moment and this one.
He zipped up the stolen overalls, pulled the name badge from it and threw it on the roof of the nearest tent, and took a breath.
“Here we go. Screwing with the past, part two.”
He shut off the mental cloak, tossed it in his bag, and stepped out into the open.
There was no stir of confusion at the newcomer. This was probably due more to the overabundance of people, each with important jobs to do, than to Lex’s stunning mastery of disguise. He’d done his best to memorize the faces and names of the people who, according to the historical records, would have been in a position to give him the access he needed. Alas, the sort of people who spend decades of their life working on massive space infrastructure projects aren’t the sort who are meticulous about updating their employee portraits, so trying to spot any of the faces he’d looked over felt more like attending a twenty-year reunion of a high school he didn’t attend and trying to match people to their yearbook picture. Since standing off to the side and scrutinizing the faces of passersby is a pretty decent way to get yourself called out as a weirdo, and no obvious way to get into the tech shed with the nodes he needed had presented itself, he decided to make his way back to the snack tent.
“Man,” he mumbled to himself. “They have corn dogs and beer at a worksite. I’m starting to think going into construction would have been worth it for the snacks alone.”
He grabbed two corn dogs, a plate of the first green thing he could find, a beer, and a seat in the shade. He had a few things going for him, assuming social hierarchy rang similarly in construction circles as they did in racing circles. First of all, it was well past noon, so it was a good bet that the only people taking their break right now were people who had enough seniority to be able to have a five-beer lunch without getting fired. Just the sort of people he needed to find. Three of them had matching GCC tattoos on their hands. Now all he had to do was find the one who could bend the rules on his behalf. The alpha among alphas.
“… And I told the guy, if you think that’s where a vent hose goes, I’ll give you a place to stick a vent hose,” bellowed a tipsy dark-skinned man with sparse gray hair on both his chin and head.
The table erupted in laughter.
Target acquired, Lex thought.
The boss equation was the same across the employment spectrum. Bad Joke + Big Laugh = Boss. Now all he had to do was schmooze himself into an opportunity to be in the tech shed, unsupervised, for a few minutes. And he had to do it with enough subtlety that history would never know he was there. Simple.
“Man,” Lex said. “That’s a classic.”
“Yeah,” said the boss. “You should have seen his face.”
“That reminds me of something my dad told me, back when he was working on the Earth-Golana Transit Spur Corridor. Number three.”
“Your dad worked on number three? Hah! My brother worked on number three. Who’s your dad?”
“Lenny Albertson,” Lex said.
“You’re one of Lenny’s boys? Backbone of Galactic Central Construction. Which one are you? You’re not Denny, are you?”
Lex hesitated. On one hand, he’d studied up on Denny and was fully prepared to impersonate him. On the other hand, the specific tone of the question set him off. It wasn’t a “No way, are you Denny?” It was a “You better not be Denny.” In retrospect, it was possible picking someone who would go on near-year-long benders and eventually get locked up for attempting to steal an asteroid wasn’t a recipe for someone who would be well-liked.
“Heck no. I’m not Denny. That bum? No. I’m Benny. What’s the matter, he never showed you a picture?”
“Oh, I haven’t worked with Lenny in twenty years. You were probably two years old.” The boss slapped his back and nearly dislodged a lung. “You must’ve been taking it easy. Not exactly in fighting shape.”
“Yeah. Things are a little lean now, I gotta say,” Lex said, when he could get his wind back.
“That’s a shame. You must be hurting for money, after the wedding.”
“Am I ever,” he said, desperately trying to remember if Benny, the sibling he wasn’t planning on portraying, was actually married.
“Where’s the ring?” said someone else at the table.
“The ring. Right,” he said, quickly rummaging in his bag. “I had to take it off. You know, safety rules.”
It took a bit of effort to unearth the ring from his stowed suit’s pocket, but he pulled it free and jammed it on his finger.
“Oh, that’s a looker. Well, you’re on a good crew. You get yourself some of that egg salad to put some meat on you and you’ll be just fine.”
Lex lowered his voice. “I’m not, uh… I’m not technically on the crew.”
“What do you mean you’re not technically on the crew. You’re here, aren’t you?”
“I talked what’s her face, the lady by the door…”
“Lulu?” one of the others at the table supplied.
“That’s her. I talked her into letting me in because…” Lex vaguely indicated the tattoo. “But I sort of need to get some time on the machines so I can back-door my way onto the crew.”
“You shouldn’t have to back-door your way on. What, did Lenny forget how to pull strings?” the boss said.
“He’s pulled just about all the strings he could pull just to try to keep that worthless brother of mine from washing out.”
“That jackass.”
“Yeah, so, I’m sort of hoping to get a little experience on the modular transit nodes so I can, you know.”
“So you can what?” said one of the others at the table.
“So I can bulk out the resume and get the job legit. They’re not exactly going to just put me on the payroll without qualifications.”
“You’re GCC. They’ll put you on the crew because you’re GCC. You’ve got satellites in your blood. I’ll go talk to the pay supervisor, get you a per diem. Then we’ll set you up with Diane over there to apprentice you on the firmware side of things, because you sure ain’t toting any hardware while you’re looking like that unless we get you on the power loader, and it’s the Orion Construction guys who run those.”
The boss spoke with a lowered voice as he named the rival firm, casting a suspicious look in their direction. The orange-jumpsuited crew seemed to primarily operate the heavy machinery. It was notable that where there were orange suits, there were no blue suits. Textbook rivalry.
“No, I don’t really need anything as official as that. I just…”
“You don’t go official, you don’t get your seniority. You don’t get your seniority, you get stuck doing the crap jobs. Come on. It’ll take two minutes.”
“… Uh… Yeah, okay,” Lex said, standing up from the table.
His mind started to sputter and grind as he paced with the big shot away from the table. There was no way they could do anything even remotely official without exposing him. He didn’t even know Benny’s date of birth, he had no identification, and he didn’t know anything at all about construction. If he were to hazard a guess, if he were to so much as show his face to anyone with the inclination to do any research, he would be in police custody for trespassing within five minutes.
A brain that not so long ago was juggling a half-dozen potentially life-threatening racing maneuvers and matching wits with a supercomputer was suddenly unable to come up with a worthwhile plan to save his life. Fortunately for Lex, while he couldn’t always come up with a good idea, he was very good at coming up with bad ones, and often desperate enough to embrace them. And this one was easily one of the worst he’d ever had.
The goal was to do something without anyone noticing. The preferred method was to do it so sneakily no one would ev
er notice. The alternative was to create a scene so big, whatever he had planned would be the least of anyone’s concerns. In a workplace where there was heavy lifting, beer, and egos, there was always the tendency toward rowdiness. He saw plenty of fat lips and bruises, which could have been occupational hazards, but at least one guy had the sort of screwed-up knuckles that Lex had come to know as a “fight bite.” They came from punching someone so hard you cut your fist on their teeth. That wasn’t an occupational hazard. That was a drunk with something to prove.
“Tell you the truth, I was hoping to get some time on those power loaders, but like you said, the Orion Construction guys are on those, and… well, I shouldn’t say.”
The boss narrowed his eyes. “What…”
“I don’t want to start any trouble,” Lex lied.
“What did those soft, know-nothing goldbrickers say?”
“They said GCC guys aren’t smart enough to run a power loader.”
The man’s lip curled into a snarl, the beer in his system whispering some very bad ideas, but he wrestled them down.
“Those idiots don’t know their asses from their elbows. Don’t let their trash talk about you hit you too hard.”
“Well, I mean, I just got here. Seems to me, they were talking about you guys.”
The boss’s eye twitched. “Oh, it’s on now.”
The boss strutted toward the nearest representative of the rival crew. There was no schoolyard shout to rally the rest of the crew. The boss’s stride was all it took to signal to the Orion Construction crew and the GCC guys that something serious was about to happen. The heavy hitters on both sides started to raise their heads and set their gazes on the coming confrontation. Lex kept pace with the boss but cast some glances toward the tech shed. The door was shut and locked.
It was a mistake to let his attention wander. When a fight is forming, things tend to happen very quickly. In this case, in the time it took for him to scope out his actual target and turn back to assess the level of escalation, a guy in a bright orange Orion Construction uniform had quickened to a sprint. Evidently he was employing the time-honored strategy of “if we’re going to be in a rumble, I call dibs on the little guy.” Thus, Lex was sent to the ground in a flailing tumble.
In the space of a few seconds, he, the boss, and about fifteen other workers who were drunk, angry, or simply spoiling for a fight had formed a dog pile. The man who pinned Lex to the ground wasn’t taking prisoners. He hammered Lex square on the nose with three serious shots. Lex might not have been able to extricate himself if not for the wedding band he’d so recently donned gashing the man’s chin with a wild counterpunch. It staggered him enough for Lex to heave him aside. He took a couple more lumps before he was able to crawl out from the pile and dash toward the tech shed, pouring blood down the front of his outfit in what was becoming an unpleasant habit.
He stalled in front of the door long enough to catch his breath and held up his fight-bruised hands to admire the ring that had gotten him out of that little jam.
“Guess you are pretty lucky,” he said. He logged the success of the superstition away for future reference and hammered on the door of the shed. “Hey! Get out here! There’s a big fight! GCC versus OR!”
The door opened, and perhaps predictably, one of the scrawnier members of the crew stood there. “What? What’s going on?”
“They were talking crap about us.”
“Damn, what happened to your nose?”
Lex touched his face and flinched. His nose was crooked. “… I guess that’s how the nose gets broken,” he muttered.
“What?”
“I said they broke my nose! Come on! Get in there! We need every guy!”
The man reluctantly hurried to the growing fray. Lex caught the door before it shut and slipped inside.
Handling the tech for the nodes was clearly a one-person operation, as there really wasn’t much room in the shed. Rack after rack of satellite components filled most of the space, with just enough room between them for a worker to circulate. The workbench itself had some specialized electronics gear, and the various bits and pieces that accumulate in any workspace. One of them, mercifully, was a box of tissues. He grabbed a handful and crammed his crooked nose full to stop the bleeding. It may have been a “slam the door after the horse got out” precaution, but starting the fight was bad enough. He didn’t need to be sprinkling his DNA all over the past.
“Okay, okay,” Lex said. “Let’s just hope that a big ol’ rumble is the sort of thing that happens often enough around here that it wouldn’t have shown up in any of the records they gave me. We’ll just assume I caused a thing that was going to happen already and keep our fingers crossed.”
The programming dongle wasn’t hard to find. The device was connected to the table with the sort of lock one would normally expect to be connected to a piece of expensive display electronics at a store, though the tether was at least long enough to reach the nearest of each of the racks. It was about the size of a slidepad. A wide, sturdy plug dominated one side of it, and a few physical buttons lined the front edge.
He turned to the row of racks. A handwritten note affixed to each one labeled them as “Format Needed,” “Configuration Needed,” and “Complete.” Lex pulled the dongle as far as the cord would reach and plugged it into one of the completed modules. The front display of the dongle lit up. Devices never intended to be used by the public seldom took user friendliness into account, and this was no exception. Whereas an off-the-shelf item with the same purpose would have bright, colorful icons and helpful tooltips, this displayed white text on a blue background and offered options with useful names like Menu 1, Menu 2, and Diag 1. Lex didn’t have patience for bad technology on the best of days, and with the sounds of a growing street fight outside the door, a throbbing nose, and the future hanging in the balance, these were not the best of times.
He dredged his memory for the name of the proper setting and flicked through an interminable sequence of menus and submenus until, finally, he stumbled upon something with an abbreviated name that could plausibly be what he was looking for. The current value for that setting was a mishmash of alphanumerics and semicolons, which was the same basic format of the value he was supposed to punch in.
Lex blinked the tears from his eyes and tapped in the code. After that, a single button press applied and confirmed the change.
“Mission accomplished,” he said, restoring the workbench to some semblance of what it had looked like when he found it. “Now, let’s see how bad things have gotten.”
He made sure the mental cloak was in place and active. When he opened the door, chaos had thoroughly consumed the space between the loading bay where the Orion crew did their work and the primary work area. The donnybrook had grown to include twenty or thirty people, with another fifty or sixty forming a ring of spectators around the fracas to cheer on their respective side. Four of the VectorCorp security people had strategically positioned themselves around the fight, but they didn’t look particularly motivated to put things to an end. Either this did indeed happen all the time, or the guards weren’t paid enough to care that it was happening now.
Lex paced carefully toward the nearest door, which was just past the dusty cloud of swinging fists. A particularly enthusiastic kick to the midsection sent an orange-suited worker stumbling out of the ring to sprawl on the ground in front of Lex. It was the same guy who had given him the bloody nose that was saturating his stolen tissues. Lex took the opportunity fate had served up for him and delivered a kick of retaliation to his ribs. It was probably not the wisest decision to kick someone while using the mental cloak, but wisdom was pretty much out the window at this point, and Lex had a lot of frustration to vent.
The injured pilot sneered at the groaning man and stepped over him. “That’s what you get. You and your dumb jumpsuit.” He gingerly touched his broken nose. “Tell your bosses, orange is a terrible color…”
#<
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Lex finished his hike back to where he’d stashed the cloaked Diamond. He changed back into his flight suit, threw the stolen jumpsuit in a ditch, and climbed aboard. Before he even started the preflight checklist, he tapped the case for the medical drone and had it do its scan so it could fix his injury. The moment the scanner registered “Broken Nose” as the diagnosis, a voice recording from Ma triggered and began to play.
“If this recording has been triggered, you have a broken nose. Based upon the known status of your in-stasis future self, and my awareness of your health status prior to your departure, it was clear that you would, at some point in the past, injure your nose. I had further theorized that this injury would come as a result of this last-minute addition to your mission, as there would ideally have been no other opportunity for you to receive such an injury in the execution of your mission. I thus predict that this diagnosis confirms your successful completion of a causality imperative. Congratulations.”
“Yeah, I feel like a real champion,” Lex said, wincing at the application of some topical analgesic.
“As the task is now complete, I am now comfortable informing you of the deed you have just performed.”
“I already know the deed I performed. I was installing the virus that’ll eventually bust down Karter’s defense.”
“The network address you altered will, at some undetermined point in the future, be used by the communication node to request a software update. That address will redirect the request to Diamond, which will need to be stationed within communication range of a VectorCorp corridor in order to receive it. Please plan your stasis location accordingly. The update we provide will install a self-perpetuating parasitic subroutine into the VectorCorp systems. A virus. Which will persist in all infected systems until modern times.”
“… What? No, no. It was supposed to be just for Karter’s system. It wasn’t supposed to just keep going.”
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